EU official tells China to drop own 3G standard, says report

LONDON --- A European Union official said that China should not go ahead with deployment of its own third generation (3G) mobile communications standard, according to a report at a website called 3Gnewsroom.

Communications equipment company Siemens and local Chinese company Datang Telecom have been developing the time-division synchronous code-division multiple-access (TD-SCDMA) standard and it has received backing from the Chinese government, most recently with spectrum allocation (see November 8 story).

According to the report Franz Jessen, deputy head of the European Union mission in Beijing, told a group of telecommunications industry officials that an integrated world standard would reduce costs and benefit globe roaming.

"What we should avoid is a re-fragmentation of the market where every country protects its own industry by promoting its own standard," he is quoted as saying.

Any criticism of China by Europe would seem misplaced, as China is open to all flavors of the International Telecommunication Union's IMT-2000 3G standard, while in practice Europe is not. In addition, a precursor to the TD-SCDMA standard was originally proposed by Siemens for adoption in Europe in the 1990s, but lost out to wideband-CDMA.

Wideband-CDMA received broad backing in both Europe and Japan partly, observers said at the time, in a bid to marginalize the rival U.S. standard cdma2000, and to secure the Chinese market. After the European and Japanese adoption of wideband-CDMA China and Datang Telecom became more interested in TD-SCDMA.

Several years in the making, TD-SCDMA now is one of three 3G standards approved by the ITU. Its backers say that it is more bandwidth-efficient than competing technologies and is thus highly suited for deployment in densely populated Chinese cities. In addition it is claimed that TD-SCDMA can be 20% cheaper to implement, make use of smart antenna systems, and provide higher data rates than the alternative standards, which we're fixed earlier.

The EU's Jessen also praised China according to the report. "It's clear that China's more cautious position in 3G license allocations is a smart move," he is quoted as saying. The report could be found here when this story was first posted.